Arata Isozaki

Philip Drew

Arata Iozaki is one of the most prolific and creative personalities in contemporary architecture. The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, arguably the architect's masterwork, was the first in a line of commissions for modern and contemporary art museums on a worldwide scale. Completed in 1974 it was refurbished and extended by Isozaki in 1994. The museum is located in the rural surroundings of the Gunma-no-Mori park, and is the most complete realization by Isozaki of conceptual architectural approach - a pristine, essential structure composed of an arrangement of cubes taking the form of a large rectangular block with projecting wings. The 1994 addition consists of a cube added to the main entrance facade housing the new Highvision Theatre, and a restaurant which occupies part of the area beneath one of the wings.

Gunma Museum

Fumihiko Maki

New Public Architecture : Recent Projects by Fumihiko and Arata Isozaki

Maki, Isozaki

Osaka Follies

One of Japan's leading architects examines notions of Japan-ness as exemplified by key events in Japanese architectural history from the seventh to the twentieth century; essays on buildings and their cultural context. Japanese architect Arata Isozaki sees buildings not as dead objects but as events that encompass the social and historical context--not to be defined forever by their "everlasting materiality" but as texts to be interpreted and reread continually. In Japan-ness in Architecture, he identifies what is essentially Japanese in architecture from the seventh to the twentieth century. In the opening essay, Isozaki analyzes the struggles of modern Japanese architects, including himself, to create something uniquely Japanese out of modernity. He then circles back in history to find what he calls Japan-ness in the seventh-century Ise shrine, reconstruction of the twelfth-century Todai-ji Temple, and the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa. He finds the periodic ritual relocation of Ise's precincts a counter to the West's concept of architectural permanence, and the repetition of the ritual an alternative to modernity's anxious quest for origins. He traces the "constructive power" of the Todai-ji Temple to the vision of the director of its reconstruction, the monk Chogen, whose imaginative power he sees as corresponding to the revolutionary turmoil of the times. The Katsura Imperial Villa, with its chimerical spaces, achieved its own Japan-ness as it reinvented the traditional shoin style. And yet, writes Isozaki, what others consider to be the Japanese aesthetic is often the opposite of that essential Japan-ness born in moments of historic self-definition; the purified stylization--what Isozaki calls "Japanesquization"--lacks the energy of cultural transformation and reflects an island retrenchment in response to the pressure of other cultures. Combining historical survey, critical analysis, theoretical reflection, and autobiographical account, these essays, written over a period of twenty years, demonstrate Isozaki's standing as one of the world's leading architects and preeminent architectural thinkers.

Japan-ness in Architecture

A detailed history of Katsura, the seventeenth-century Imperial Palace in Kyoto, Japan, a pivotal work of Japanese architecture, often described as the 'quintessence of Japanese taste'. First revealed to the modern architectural world by Bruno Taut, the great German architect, in the early twentieth-century, Katsura stunned and then excited the architectural community of the West. Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, pillars of the Modernist establishment, were fascinated by Katsura's 'modernity'. This book documents the palace in detail, combining newly commissioned photographs, detailed drawings, archival material, and historical analysis.

Arata Isozaki

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